by Lisa Carey
But now what came before is beginning all over again. Now the islanders will know what she can do and will expect it. Now there will be so much coming into her she will not be able to be empty and receive the only thing she truly wants. Now another damaged, deadened girl has felt a promising twinge in her presence and is looking at her hungrily, wanting Brigid to show her what it means. And Brigid won’t be able to resist.
Chapter 8
St. Brigid’s Home for Wayward Girls
1933–1936
Every one of the Sisters sounded like Brigid’s mother. They had emigrated as an entity, an exodus of Brigidine nuns from Connemara who came to Maine to start a Home for Wayward Girls. The rumors about why they were there were thick, layered by years of speculation in the minds of their imaginative charges. That they had once been wayward girls themselves, that they’d all had babies, and if you lifted the dark folds of their skirts you would find the evidence, skin that had been stretched then vacated and left not quite the same. Once the evidence of their shame was taken away, they were given habits and made to care for the next crop of impregnated girls as penance. Some thought that the nuns were the babies—that they’d been born to unwed mothers in Ireland, raised by nuns and expatriated to do the same; shame, beat and leave hopeless a whole new generation of sinful girls.
This was suggested during a dorm room discussion, voices rising from the thin, squeaky cots. Every ten minutes the door would open, Sister Margaret would say “Whisht!” with the same vicious impatience as Brigid’s mother once did. It only shut the girls up for a few seconds.
“If that was true,” a girl named Mary said. “What happened to the boy babies?”
“Priests.”
“Drowned.”
“Eaten!” The voices came in quick succession out of the darkness.
“There weren’t any boys,” a girl said. “Everyone knows those babies are always girls. That’s how God punishes you.”
“Of course there were boys,” a girl named Jeanne said, dismissively. She had a grainy, mannish voice. “The boys get adopted by rich folks in Boston. They go to Harvard. Then they knock up their girlfriends and send them back here.” There was a silence as everyone digested this.
Jeanne had stringy brown hair, a bald patch worn above her forehead where she couldn’t stop pulling it out. One eye and cheek were given over to a wine-stain birthmark, and the saturation of color changed with her mood. She smoked cigarettes and had fat, wormy scars on her arms from when, rumor had it, she had once tried to kill herself. She was the same age as Brigid, twelve, but seemed old before her time. Brigid hadn’t had the nerve to talk to her yet, but Jeanne often caught her staring, which left Brigid hot, confused and mortified.
All the girls in this dorm were either too young or too lucky to be pregnant, they were here because they were orphaned or molested or abandoned. Not unwed mothers or adoptable babies, but unwanted and in-between.
“Why do the boys get adopted?” someone whined in the dark.
“What are you, some sort of retard?” Jeanne said, and Sister Margaret came in again, whishting, and this time they settled down, not so much out of obedience or sleepiness but because they were too discouraged to continue the topic. In the silence, Brigid could still hear them all, a roomful of girls, turning fact and fiction over in their minds, the same way their lean, underdeveloped bodies flipped like fish between the stiff sheets.
Brigid had never gone to school, never done a calisthenic or purposeful exercise, never ridden a bike or counted money. She’d never had a friend. Unlike the girls who had come from farms she had not handled horses or cleaned out stalls, and though on the island they’d once had hens, they refused to lay eggs for so long her father had just wrung their necks. Their milk, sour and smelling of urine, had come from a moody little goat that submitted to her mother’s hands with a look of pure disgruntlement. Brigid was a terrible cook, she couldn’t sew a stitch, and she had never seen a mop.
At the convent she was expected to work. Clean and scrub and wring until her hands were cracked and bleeding from the harsh soap and hot water. Overnight, alone in her bed, she ran healing fingers over the skin, until she realized that if the nuns saw you had smooth hands they made you do even more. So she let the raw cracked skin form into calluses that dirt could not escape from.
Before breakfast they worked, after breakfast they had school in their scrubbed-out classrooms. Brigid could read but had no concept of what to do with numbers, so she often ended up grouped with the six-year-olds. After school were exercises in the cold yard, jumping jacks and running in circles, tennis against a cement wall. Then more work. Dishes, laundry, toilets, floors. Cleaning was a never-ending process, much like the purification of their souls. They would never be pure, but they were expected to attack the tarnish daily. Prayer was an astringent, prayer and penance, like bleach and scalding water. Kneeling on stone for so long it felt as if your kneecaps had shattered under the pressure and you could barely limp back to your dorm. Lashings, given not so much as a punishment for rudeness or shirking but as a lesson in the graceful acceptance of pain, girls’ backs ripped into ridges that would heal and form a shell they could bear their life upon.
Once a week, in the early hours before an interminably long Mass, the girls lined up in the pews of the chapel and went behind the altar to confess to Father Hanrahan. He came on Sundays only, up from Bangor, and seemed equally uninterested in the nuns and the girls. It was said he was only there for show, that every such place needed a priest to maintain the illusion that someone was in charge. He spent five minutes with each girl. He tried to glean something, anything, out of Brigid, she suspected at the prompting of Mother Superior, but she remained as monosyllabic as she’d been since arriving. “If you don’t let it out, my child,” he said once, “the sin will fester inside you. It will eat your soul away. Let it out so God can forgive you.”
“Yes, Father,” she said, but she didn’t volunteer anything.
He eventually sighed and gave her handfuls of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, prayers she didn’t know, and traded her for a more malleable girl, one who liked to try to shock him or another who burst into tears over her own unworthiness. Brigid kept her soul locked up tight.
Most of the other girls ignored her. She didn’t try to get attention, wasn’t vying for the roles of rebel or saint, hardest worker or cleverest student or basket case. She worked at being invisible, and they allowed it. Only Jeanne could not leave her alone.
“I heard your mother murdered your father,” she would say when they were scrubbing in adjacent stalls in the bathroom. “How did she do it? Did you help?” The other girls stiffened with anticipation when they heard the cruel things Jeanne said to her. But Brigid, who had grown up with parents who sometimes spat the worst things that came to their mind, ignored her. Jeanne was worshipped by most of them. She cursed readily and creatively. She was known for alarming sessions in deserted broom closets and bathrooms where she would wrench something violent and luscious out of another girl’s body, something most girls, especially the young ones, had barely suspected was there, and leave them limp and wondering when she might do it again. Most of the girls, the ones of a certain age where something was happening that no one bothered to explain, watched Jeanne with breathless hunger, wondering when it would next be their turn for the few thrilling moments in a bathroom stall, trapped against the cold tile wall, Jeanne’s hands working on them until they could barely stand up. The lucky ones were captured by her in an empty dorm, or in one of the offices with leather sofas. If you met up with Jeanne and there was an available surface, something you’d never even imagined would happen. She would lay you down and do something that later the girl could barely explain, something that left their faces fired with shame and revisited delight.
Brigid, when she heard these whispered rumors, late at night in her hard, exposed bunk, turned over and pressed the pillow around her ears, trying not to think about Jeanne’s huge, chapped, angry mou
th.
At St. Brigid’s there was a separate floor for the pregnant girls. They came when their bellies were no longer easy to hide, and left after the baby was born and given away. They had their own schoolroom, which wasn’t used very much, the idea being that if they could read and write there wasn’t much use in bothering after that. The lucky ones would still get to finish school, or get married, but most of them would end up doing alternate versions of what they did now, laundry, scrubbing other people’s waste off of toilets, boiling up tasteless, filling meals for large crowds. The younger girls rarely got to see them, because their sins were so garish and alive, bellies like enormous blisters underneath their frumpy uniforms. The littlest girls, before they were unceremoniously told how it all worked, thought there was something contagious about the swollen stomachs, that either you could become engorged yourself if you were touched by them, or that the broken morality that landed them there could seep into you, and eventually cause you to make the same life-ruining mistake.
What Brigid noticed most about these girls, when she glimpsed them move, not so gracefully, through the hallway past their classroom, was that they weren’t girls anymore. They were not much older than she was, the youngest swollen belly belonged to a girl of thirteen, but the babies inside them transformed them into something else. The lewd jut of the belly, the small gestures that surrounded it, hands placed without thought on the top, or slid underneath like a ballast, showed that whatever child the girl had been before had been swallowed up by the new one growing inside.
They were supposed to be a warning, these girls, trapped by their sins, lonely for their families, not allowed to keep their babies. Brigid couldn’t get enough of them. She volunteered for jobs that gave her glimpses, sweeping the hall near the room where they sewed, their enormous forms wedged between their chairs and the frantic sewing machines. She washed windows so she could watch their halting, unbalanced exercise in the yard. She lay in her cot at night, rolled up her itchy nightgown, and ran her rough palms over a child’s flat chest and belly, closed her eyes and imagined a swelling, a growth, a body full of something else, something that was, mercifully, not her. Like the changeling she once begged for, not from the ground, but forged from the very soul that desired it.
When babies were ready to be born, the doctor’s car came and stayed the night. The doctor often took the baby away with him, a basket in his passenger seat permanently there for this purpose. Only occasionally would a couple come to St. Brigid’s, young, healthy, ridiculously happy people who took the baby and left behind a foul mood. No one liked such blunt happiness displayed in the corridors of St. Brigid’s, least of all the nuns. It didn’t belong, and left everyone fantasizing about things they’d sworn to leave behind.
Sometimes, the baby died. The nuns always said that this was a blessing.
Jeanne was the first girl Brigid healed. She was known for getting the worst of Sister Josephine’s whippings, a masochistic nun who would stop only when a girl begged forgiveness, because pure stubbornness meant she passed out before ever giving in. She liked to pull up her nightgown and show her scars to new girls, just for the satisfaction she got from the release of their lip, the tremble, the tears when they realized, with a glimpse of her ugly back, what their life here would be like. She had tried it on Brigid when she’d first arrived and the other girls had gaped at how easily Brigid, who had barely spoken to anyone, laughed.
Jeanne paid her back for that laugh two weeks later. She and Brigid were cleaning the dormitory bathroom and Jeanne attacked with no warning, a punching, kicking, hair-pulling dervish. Brigid didn’t hit back, but did what her mother used to, made herself as small as possible to minimize the damage, and waited for Jeanne to give up. By the time she did, the white tiled floor was brilliant with blood. A kick had made it through to her nose. Sister Josephine pulled Jeanne off her and dragged her to her office for a caning, and Sister Margaret, a gentle but ineffectual nun, gave Brigid a cloth for her bleeding nose and walked her to the infirmary. Sister Margaret cleaned the blood off Brigid’s face with astringent and hot water, but found no wounds or bruises underneath. Since she wasn’t injured, she sent Brigid along to be caned as well. When Brigid arrived at the sister’s office, two other nuns were carrying the unconscious Jeanne to the infirmary.
Sister Josephine hit her twice, two hard, slicing blows, before Brigid said it was enough and that she was penitent. The nun was surprised, sure Brigid would be the stubborn one, let one more fly before sending her on her way.
She watched the corridor until Sister Margaret left the infirmary for afternoon prayers, then stepped in to find Jeanne lying on the cot behind a white screen. Jeanne was so occupied with stifling her convulsive sobs that she didn’t hear Brigid come over to her. She was lying on her side in only her underwear, her back pulpy with scars and fresh lashings sliced through them. There was so much there, so many times she’d been hit or begged to be hit again, that Brigid realized, as she reached out to touch it, how hard Jeanne had worked to build up such armor. She was sorry that she had laughed at it. The whole time Jeanne had been hitting her, Brigid had been waiting for this part, the part that came later, the penance.
Jeanne turned her head at the first touch, but before she could react, throw her off, sit up and try to fight her again, Brigid put one hand on her back and the other she brought to Jeanne’s mouth, crossing a finger over her lips that asked for promised silence. She spread her fingers out over the bloody gashes, closed her eyes and pulled. The heat came out pulsing, angry, and coarse, so different from the quality of her own wounds that at first Brigid thought something was wrong, and that she would not be able to do it. Jeanne’s wounds lashed out at her, pulling the places in her body not in one long slow climax, but in quick wallops of pleasure, so that by the time she was done and the wounds were gone, Brigid felt not peaceful like she usually did, but unfinished. She used her hands, hot and full and still tingling, to turn Jeanne over onto her now painless back. Jeanne’s body was caught in the middle of a metamorphosis. Girl with woman half emerged, with lean, childish hips and hard, swollen lumps of breasts that poked up with the same angry defiance as her face. Footsteps in the hallway startled them both, Jeanne pulled the white sheet up to her neck and Brigid reeled back, overcome with nausea, and Sister Margaret came in to find her vomiting in the white sink.
That night Brigid lay awake, her heart bonging, waiting for something to happen. She saw Jeanne get up, slipping soundlessly through the shadows, and she counted to sixty before getting up to follow her. Jeanne went to the infirmary, and when Brigid arrived there she found the girl already lying naked in the same spot they’d been interrupted. She thought of her father and his studio and the apologies she never got, and reached a hand out to touch her. Jeanne’s back arched, she closed her eyes. Brigid lifted her nightgown above her head and climbed onto the table and pressed into another girl all she had once wanted pressed into her. They opened their legs and mouths and hands, and what Brigid once imagined growing between her parents grew between them, for a terribly long time, something that cracked her open and never went away. Even after it was over and they were hastily dressing, worried about nuns patrolling the hall, it was still there, waiting impatiently for the slightest touch before it would swell again and take them over.
Later that night in her cot, when Jeanne came to slip under the covers with her, it was as if they had never let go, as if they had been pressed together for the hours in between, waiting for the right moment to begin to move.
In the summer, they worked outside. They sunburned until their skin peeled off in swaths, leaving a lighter imprint of freckles underneath. They planted seeds, watered, weeded and picked what grew from them. They milked cows, stole eggs from angry hens, and tended the bees: a whole city skyline of tall wooden hives with drawers so heavy that they needed two girls to pull them, heavy with the honey the nuns sold to the town market. They weren’t meant to taste it, but they did, feeding each other fingerfuls when
no one was looking. Brigid got used to the sound of bees behind everything she did, a dizzy buzz urging her through chores, toward the next moment she and Jeanne could steal alone.
They found each other every day, capturing slivers of privacy in a place where their every move was watched. Lying down in blueberry fields, standing against giant oak trees in the woods. Brigid loved to watch Jeanne’s face, the way her birthmark darkened and the cruel mask fell away, as she lost herself to Brigid’s hands. Jeanne called it making love. This name made sense to Brigid. She had waited for love but now knew it had to be made, sometimes by ripping something apart and sealing it back together again, or pulled out of someone the way they were learning to pull clay into the walls of a cup. You built it, with fire and clay and honey and skin. You made love. They hid this because they were supposed to, but not one bit of it felt wrong.
The first time she bled, a year after arriving, when she was thirteen, she was no longer naive enough to try to heal it. You couldn’t live with twenty girls, half of whom had entered puberty, and not know that at some point blood would begin to drip under your dress. The nuns said it was a punishment for being a woman, but some of them, your first time, would let you lie down for the afternoon with a hot brick. Jeanne was shocked when she found out the holes in Brigid’s reproductive knowledge. Though she had breasts now, Brigid, breasts that grew so quickly she needed a larger dress every month, breasts as soft and welcoming as Jeanne’s were angry and hard, and her period, she had missed some important information somewhere. She believed that now that she was bleeding, Jeanne would be able to put a baby inside her. Jeanne felt almost bad about shattering the delusion, but not bad enough to be gentle about it.